Poems
Perfume
I. The rose-song
Alcaeus, the Ancient Greek, held his lyre like a creature,
like a cat under his fingers. He—shade-eyed,
curtailed, hair in vines—is a smear of oil paint
at the Metropolitan Museum. I have only ever
seen him on a screen. They teach you to close
a bottle of turps while using it, because the smell
is so strong. In its innocent plastic bottle
it’s clear as water. Could even be mistaken
for a Pump bottle, some fake-berry flagon
of esters and ethyls. But it could wipe the sweet face
of Alcaeus clean in one rub of a rag.
Why wait we for the torches’ lights?
he sings.
The poets betrayed me—I thought they’d all read
the Greeks, but turns out it was only Dickinson.
All her em dashes like bleeding mouths on the page,
itching to say something more—cutting their own
teeth for their fizz of calcium. When I think about it,
Alcaeus is much more beautiful a few thousand years on,
having been translated into a pretty pile of dust.
He is wreathed in grape leaves. I imagine his scent—
feet and leather. And the fruit’s tense crush.
Why wait we for the torches’ lights?
I have become obsessed with perfume.
Fragrantica reviews fill my mouth
with new and strange vocabularies: oud, gourmand, extrait,
sillage, solvent. Then there are others, like musk,
that aren’t new, but take on a different mystique, their changed
meaning a fresh summer coat. I buy a stupidly expensive
4ml and feel it rattle in my bag. Excellent sillage, the reviews
assure me, but sticks close to the skin. It smells like
childhood memories of grape juice, those fragrant Concord
grapes that are only ever found in someone’s backyard,
skins loose and leathery, insides jellified. I wear it as if
somebody has taken control of my wrists, walking around
palms-forward. I don’t want to smudge the smell on anything,
keeping it all for myself, my laurel of grapes, the light
Grecian step it gives me. A fragrance is perceived through
its individual particles, the write-ups tell me. Skin itself
becomes a substrate.
Why wait we for the torches’ lights?
And why wait I for something to happen? At night,
I drink wine with a boy who looks a bit like a Greek
if I squint hard enough. I tell him that my favourite part
of sleepovers was when it was late and sluggish
and surreal, and you’d start telling secrets
almost unwillingly. He tells me that we experience life once
in childhood and the rest is memory, although he stole that
from some other poet. I don’t think I can write an original
poem. I want to whisper to you like a girl.
I want the night to bear fruit under our nails.
Now let us drink while day invites.
The morning-light of your face makes me turn my wrists
inwards and forget how to sip my coffee. You trace
the inside of your mocha, calcified and brown. You wear
no perfume, and I can tell from your glasses and ill-fitted
skirt that you left the house in a hurry. But your eyelashes
against your sun-splacked face are so neat and black
I can hardly look at them. And sweet morning-smell clings
to you like sweat.
Now let us drink while day invites.
What roses are there in this waxy-white garden?
I am writing before any of this has even happened,
as if it is as immovable and unknowable as Alcaeus,
his beautiful oily body and the way he gripped his lyre,
like someone would take it from him. The boy told me
it was right, to commit the ultimate injustice of writing
you before I have you. I told him it would spell doom
as if poetry really was powerful enough to rule/ruin cities.
II. The water-diamond
The sea is the end of all smells.
You tell me you used to play
mermaids down there, the place
where you grew up in plastic tiaras
then grew to hate. Walked the beach,
collected shells. Things everyone
once did, but I let you feel original.
Now you like fast cars.
It’s such a funny transposition
I can only laugh. You talk about pile-ups,
crushed-in metal and sharp hot fires.
I imagine the Sharpie-in-nose sting
of petrol. The sticky stink
of the drivers. The wet track.
It often looks like water,
the rainbow pool of exhaust.
And cars drip from their tyres
sometimes, great gushes of relief.
You like fast cars and demolition.
I clutch my lyre tighter.
There’s such an easy way to keep you
forever, if ever you decide it all
wasn’t worth it. I hold my cat
like a gut-string. She scrapes my tongue.
III. Unluck
My family’s households are all the same:
stale oil and stacked cupboards. I enjoy
their rancid comfort and eat
the stir-fried beef and mushrooms
laid over their ceremonial altar
of virgin-white noodles. I wear black
eyeliner and reek of that cheap stuff
from Mecca that little girls wear:
Brazilian jasmine and dragon fruit.
My nine-year-old cousin tells me
about retinol and strawberry legs and I look down
to see the thousand red divots in my calves
from shaving a thousand times. The gasping shock
of an accidental cut comes back to me,
how much it bleeds, bright at first
then diluting strawberry-milk in the shower.
I don’t mention the calm serenity
of an intentional one. Or how it is
in front of the mirror, my hair
in a thousand weirdly sharp shards
on the floor, my head Samson and my hand
Delilah. You can waste a whole day,
pulling a scissored edge of keratin
from the bottom of a foot.
IV. The matchbox sermon
At night there was a candle lit with the old match
sitting beside it all crispy charcoal and somehow
in the window’s reflection it looked like there was a lit
match undestroyingly sitting on the table alight with nobody
to see it in that window but me and when
my cat looks through that same pane of glass she thinks
there is another cat and once the night was so blue
and claw-like in my eyelashes and it smelled
like nothing like it could have infinite cologne poured
into it but still feel baby-innocent and anew but now
it only makes me think of balconies where twenty-somethings
smoke cigarettes and I pretend to care at all yeah it smells
like leaning out the window all negligéed all coquetted
burning burning for what for what
V. Quintet
Summer rain falls on me;
the day turns in on itself.
My secret is biblical:
it has happened before
it has begun. I have spoken
of it now. Let the strings
rattle like the handle of a broken bus.
I ask my mother how elaborate
and stupid an expense it would be,
to buy that full YSL bottle I’d been
salivating over. Baby-pink.
And that little black bow.
If you want it, she says.
The thick-set glass
and the pink-striped box.
I think about how it would be
to love you,
your tattoo, your face
a powerline falling.
Nightthoughts
It rained so abundantly that night like God herself or
a Bach fugue and with it came the nightthoughts.
The nightthoughts, where I dream you hate me, reach
for the dark reality of your head half-dreaming and
find you gone, in the lounge watching television or
something; everything you do is bright and blinding like
lightning to me, and so I forget exactly what it is. And the
rain brings out the smell of other people’s clothes
in my clothes, the remembrance of the yellow-pissy water
I wrung from that beaded maroon skirt when I washed it,
probably for the first time since the eighties. You smell of
textbooks and look like a real-life photograph; I remember you
like a memory of a night. I remember the subtly different wings
of your eyeliner, you having misjudged the distances. Look
I’m not here to write about supermarket produce. I don’t care about
Moore Wilson’s orange juice—or even about eyeliner, if it weren’t
for the fact that it was on your face. It’s night, like it always is
in a poem. It closes in around us like the National Portrait Gallery.
I, having misjudged the distances, grope for you in the dark.
Cadence Chung (she/they) is a poet, classical singer, and composer. She performs as a classical soloist and is a presenter on RNZ Concert. In 2023, she was named an Emerging Practitioner by the Fund for Acting and Musical Endeavours. Her poems have been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Newsroom, Pantograph Punch, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, takahē, The Spinoff, and Turbine | Kapohau. Her bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in 2022. She’s also the producer and editor of Mythos: An Audio-Visual Anthology of Art by Young New Zealanders, released in 2024. Mad Diva is her first full-length collection of poetry.